RPGMemes

To be fair, Gygax as a DM was adversarial AF and literally sought every opportunity to TPK with singular focus. To him, the way you won at D&D was to know the game better than the DM, and he was an insufferable ass about it, NGL. (source: I had the privilege of playing at his table at GenCon in the 90s) The bit about the Wish Fulfillment is spot on, as the OG creators of the system constructed it out of spreadsheets and statistics (shudders in THAC0) in order to "realistically" play out their own branches of Tolkein's grand tales. So, with that in mind, and LotR in its entirety as a blueprint, the casters-as-gods-in-training and martials grabbing all the glory makes perfect sense.

And that's not even touching on the extreme rarity of "late game" sessions ever being played. The impact of obligations on scheduling in adulthood combined with the exponentially more complex prep work involved on both sides of the table add up to "campaigns" being a pipe dream for all but the most cloistered of gaming groups. In fact, smart money's on the likelihood that high level short arcs & one shots easily outnumber by an order of magnitude the campaigns that've reached late game status through regular play.

So, I guess what I'm saying here is: comparing the two is less about what affects actual gameplay and pretty much only about debating who would win in a fight and at what point on their level progression — not unlike arguing which comic book character could whip another one's ass, or which sportsball player has the better stats at certain points in their career... And, we're back to Wish Fulfillment theorycrafting. 🤓🧙🏼‍♂️